Margaret Paston, sole heiress of John Mautby, is almost certainly the best-known laywoman who lived in fifteenth-century England. Her marriage to John Paston was a major step upward for his ambitious parents and an important moment in the family’s history. During the long marriage and widowhood that followed, Margaret emerged as the most prolific writer in the justly famous Paston correspondence. The 104 letters she authored show her to have been ambitious, energetic, efficient, and completely devoted to advancing her husband’s and sons’ interests. Given the scope of her correspondence, its reticence about her religious beliefs is striking. It is therefore welcome that Joel Rosenthal, a well-known social historian of the period, has mined her letters for and written a book about this dimension of her life.

Throughout Margaret Paston’s Piety, Rosenthal asserts that she is an “ideal case study: a typical woman of her class, culture, and time” (11) and that she was “a conventional, pious, sober (and feminine) representative of late medieval lay religion” (4). While these assessments may be true, they are not sustainable without comparing Margaret to other women of her time and class, the material for which exists in contemporary wills, letters, and the work of antiquarians and local historians. As it stands, therefore, Margaret Paston’s Piety provides a fascinating study of a single remarkable woman that provides a starting point for research that supports Rosenthal’s generalization.

In some ways, as Rosenthal makes clear, the evidence of the Paston letters about Margaret’s spiritual life is negative. The subject of her belief or concern about her soul never comes up. Nor does she record her attendance at church or occasions on which she took the sacrament. Rosenthal notes correctly that she was uninvolved in the patronage of religious books and shows no signs of being influenced by the kind of East Anglian mysticism associated with Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich. On one occasion, in 1443, she did vow to make a pilgrimage to Walsingham for her husband when he was seriously ill, but there is no record that she actually fulfilled it. Her religious life was apparently neither intense nor troubled.

However, there is evidence outside the correspondence that Margaret had confidence in the institutional church and its power to ensure her salvation. She maintained a chapel that enabled her to take the sacrament privately at Mautby, where she spent the last decade or more of her life. Her expenditures on securing the licenses required to keep it, and on furnishing it with the necessary vestments, prayer books, and chapel plate, were only a fraction of the money she spent on the churches with which she was associated. Her largest project, undertaken jointly with her husband, was at St. Peter’s Hungate in Norwich, where they acquired the advowson of the church in 1458. In the following years, they tore it down and rebuilt it completely. Paston and Mautby arms filled the stained glass east window, recording for posterity their status as founders and patrons of the church.

Building on this scale was unusual, even in a period when the landed classes as a whole were investing unprecedented sums in the architecture and beautification of their churches, but it was not Margaret’s only activity of this kind. In her will, she asked to be buried with her ancestors in the aisle of Mautby church and directed that it be “new robed, leaded, and glassed, and the walls thereof hightened conveniently and workmanly” (The Paston Letters, A. D. 1422–1509, ed. James Gairdner, New Complete Library Edition [1904; repr., New York, 1973], vol. 6, 46–49). She also remembered five other churches—including the one in the parish where she was born—with smaller gifts of vestments and money for repairs.

Furthermore, whatever the silence of her letters about her religious beliefs, Margaret’s will is eloquent about her faith in the doctrine of purgatory and efficacy of prayers for the dead. She funded prayers on her anniversary at Mautby for twelve years after her death, and prayers in the aisle where she was buried, for herself, her husband, her parents, and her in-laws for seven years. In addition, there were explicit provisions for prayers at eight other churches or religious institutions. Margaret almost certainly also expected prayers from the dozen or more other hospitals, churches, and lepers to whom she made bequests, although she did not make explicit directions to that effect. It is surprising that Rosenthal did not discuss this evidence about Margaret’s beliefs, particularly since it supports his contention that she was representative of her class, which was single minded in its focus on the doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the dead.

However one evaluates the typicality of Margaret Paston’s religious life, Rosenthal’s book is a valuable addition to both family and women’s history. Throughout, it places Margaret in the context of her family and community and demonstrates in detail the opportunities that fifteenth-century gentlewomen had to influence their families, control resources, and exercise power outside the institutional structure that men dominated. Well written and accessible, it is a valuable text for introducing students to late medieval England in a wide variety of history courses.